This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc).
Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours.
I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this fact. You have to read the report to get that.
Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day.
Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about the specific details.
Wait, hold the phone. That's not really accurate according to the article nor the paper he linked. The trial was 6 hour work days, as the article claims.
After downloading the aforementioned paper and uploading the to google translate, since I don't speak Swedish:
> Summary 18 months with 6 hours
> 6 hours of trial
> City of Gothenburg decided in 2014 to conduct a trial with 6-hour day with follow-up research. The trial started 2015-02-01 and 2016-12-31 terminated after 23 months. The trial will answer the question about the effects of reduced working hours have for nurses, tenants and the economy / jobs.
> The trial has been shortened working hours to 6 hours per day and 14.9 full-time employees, 17 nurses have been hired to compensate for reduced working hours. Consequential changes have made of schedule at Svartedalen center for the elderly. To provide a high comparability has no other changes made by different senior housing from others. In follow research studies 100 % Of nurses participated.
...
> There are 29 sessions on a six-week period in the new schedule. Three of the six weekends included. Employees at Svartedalen work in the trial between five and seven hours on daily schedule. In practice, between 6 hours and 6.25 hours (6 hours and 15 minutes). That it not exactly six hours per day due to scheduling must answer received business needs.
> Night schedule is at least six and no more than eight hours. Before the experiment was working nine hours on overnight.
So yeah, the resulting full-time hours were 30, but the study was specifically interested in 6-hour work days, according to the report. The only reason it wasn't exactly 6 was for business/logistical reasons.
We call a standard work day 8 even though it isn't exactly 8. If indeed the idea was to shift a standard work day from approximately 8 hours to approximately 6 hours, it seems reasonable to refer to it as the "6-hour work day". (I haven't read the report, so won't comment on whether that was indeed the focus, as opposed to a more flexible 30-hour week.)
Everywhere i've worked that has actually cared about hours meant 8 when they said 8. My current job (as stupid as I think it is) requires me to be at work and not on lunch for 8 hours a day.
TL;DR the study is a 30 hour/week study and in practice the employees work 6 to 6.25h a day. When you speak about the study in laymen terms, you can say 6 hour/workday pilot because that is what it is in practice , however to be scientifically correct it is 30 hours/week pilot.
Full explanation ->
From the report with Google Translate
> Full-time dimensions in the study is 30 hours / week compared to normal working hours at 38.25 hours in the daytime alternatively 37.00 hours (depending on working agreement at the time of appointment) and 36.33 hours for the night.
So the report clearly states 30 hours/week as "heltidsmått" (a measured full-time). Not 6 hours/day.
What about "in practice"? If you look at the first report after 6 months
Page 6, two tables of example schedules, one to the left before the pilot and the right during the pilot. Remember that a work day includes a free 30 min lunch break so there is a difference between the two columns Period and Timmar (Hours) for 0.5h except the night shift, no free lunch there!
As we can see all day shifts are either 6h or 6.25h during the pilot.
So what about the 5 to 7 hours? I think that is the range what the pilot accepts as "6-hour" workday measurement, i.e you have to have min-max otherwise you could put everything on two days.
New note: one of the political parties behind this pilot, the Left party, calls the pilot "six hour working day/30 hours working week". That should keep it covered!
They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?
Then again, the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them. In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees. However, the Bloomberg source[1] also mentions that pay was not cut, which led to the overhead costs. You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away.
In the US the 8 hour work day was established by FDR with one feature being that it would tighten the labor market (and reduce unemployment) by forcing employers to hire more people.
The lower hours also reduced workplace injuries and provided longer term economic gains [1]. This study is probably too short measure the arguably more important gains that would take a long time to show up.
1: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon.
"Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported."
Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no?
That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment.
My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit might have been considered worth the cost.
The experiment was to find any positive benefits. If you look at it from that perspective (as a research project) it makes much more sense. Before we could guess what benefits would result, but now we know.
I think the idea is that costs ballooned more than expected.
That shouldn't be shocking either - each shift change requires people to scrub in, pass on information from the previous shift, and so on - but it's a deeper question than adding new staff to cover the missing hours.
The numbers suggest this is not the case. They needed 17 extra employees for 68 existing staff members. Naively, one would expect that for 68 x 8 = 544 man hours per week, one would need 544/6 = 91 (rounded up) employees. Yet 68+17 = 85, which is six employees less!
Presumably some shifts require managers/bookkeepers/etc not required on other shifts. The overnight shift is less likely to require a receptionist dedicated to walk-in visitors and phone calls for example...
I'd be interested in how long they've had 68 employees for; was it 68 two years prior to the trial, or even 51?
I wonder if there's a balance somewhere here too. Perhaps have employees work 7 hours at a slightly reduced rate.
This trial alone is probably difficult to draw solid conclusions from, other than to say if these employees work less they produce less (albeit not proportionately it seems).
Ouch, I didn't stop to do the math. I had assumed the naive addition turned out to be too small, but this makes it hard to understand what surprised them!
It was kind of a weird scenario to test this in. Regardless of productivity gains number of hours staff would need to be on hand will of cause remain the same, if nothing else do to regulations. Still there might have been a ton of complaining, had they tested on staff in public administration.
I'm a huge fan of the idea of shorter work weeks, it's obvious that some jobs won't be able to introduce them without cost. Also, assuming Sweden and Denmark aren't to different at this point, there might not actually be enough skill people walking around without jobs to fill in the gaps in the sectors where people are required to be present, regardless to productivity boosts.
That extra day off would do far more for people than one or two less hours every day. So 4x8=32 hours, vs 6x5=30 hours. I would even bargain for 4 days/9 hours, or 4x9=36 hours.
That third day is huge. It's the difference from having only enough time for some leisurely weekend activities, to having enough time to take a mini-3-day-vacation every week (short flights, etc.).
Agreed. Especially when taking commuting into account - for me, one day off means 2 hours less commuting.
During the past year, I've actually started trying this out. I've taken a couple of my vacation weeks and spread them out - instead of taking one week vacation, I've taken Fridays off for five weeks. It's been amazing. Somehow it feels like that extra day counts twice: your weekend gets one day longer, and your work week gets one day shorter!
You're probably right, if I did have kids I would prefer 5x6h until I shed that responsibility (they leave the house once adults).
But as someone without kids, being able to take short flights or trips every week over 3 days would be awesome.
I guess ideally, since 5x6h and 4x8h are only two hours apart, a utopian workplace would offer its employees either option -- the people who chose 4x8h would make 2h more wages weekly.
I do 40 flexible hours already, so I do a couple of hours in the evening or on the weekend, just to get a 6-7h typical day, to fit the schedule with school pickup etc.
If I wanted, I could work 4x10 (With some sweet talking to a manager perhaps). I'd very much prefer to have 30, 32 or 35h to distribute over the week though, it would make the planning a lot easier. In that case I'd do e.g. 5x6 now that my small children needs early pickup, but I'd go to 4x8 when I have larger children who can bike home from school, so we can go on a weekend trip with friday off.
Having a 4 day work week would mean one day off without kids (they are in school/sitter/day-care) which would be great and would give you tons more freedom just to get things done. Either chores around the house, need to take the car to the shop, visit the DMV, any number of things that are extremely difficult and busy on a Saturday with kids.
Of course, if everyone works 4 days a week and has the same 5th day off that advantage goes away I suppose.
A large part of the reason I took the job I'm currently working at is the slightly shorter work hours combined with flexible work hours means that I can put in a bit less than two hours extra for four days and take the fifth one off. Do that on both sides of the weekend and your mini 3 day holiday becomes one where you get waaay more time at your destination and more than the travel time even if you're spending a large part of a day at each end travelling.
Currently working at a digital agency doing 4x8 (32 hours). It works really well for us and the extra day really does make a huge difference with work/life balance. Really huge.
It does mean the week is more compacted and there's less time spent "twirling your thumbs", but it's a much better schedule over all and we continue to produce great work.
I guess it makes less sense for a business though: you're probably less productive the longer you work on a same day, and most businesses will still have to work according to the traditional Mon-Fri schedule. 6 hours per day over 5 days might be the right balance.
I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted.
I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.
And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well.
IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time).
Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we should move to a more flexible approach.
So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:
how do I know how much work is enough?
If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.
But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work.
When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.
But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.
I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance.
This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?
Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done.
Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though.
Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work done".
If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale and "gets his work done"?
I started out as an hourly contractor doing projects for a really good salesperson, and then she bought all my time that I cared to sell (about 30 hours a week), and then we formalized it as a w2 position about 10 months ago.
It's a very small company with doing web dev projects; there's only the boss (who pretty much just does sales), the "Design Dept. Head" out in SF, the "Chief Project Manager" in Az, and me (I'm an hour outside of Austin), plus a couple of off and on freelancers.
TBH, the expectation is mostly that "we get stuff done"; for example I had to meet with a client for a sub-contracted NSF gig on our NYE holiday. Or I have had to fix broken stuff in the middle of the night/ work late to make some magic happen occasionally. That has been rare enough so that, like the once or twice a year I have to travel, it's novel and kind of fun.
But between the limited sales pipeline, higher-margin clientele, and being fairly efficient the formal office hours that I agreed to are easy to maintain.
I play a lot of music, and I suspect that it's very much like being in a successful band would be like (I wouldn't know specifically what that is like, though, I only gig on the weekends at bars).
When I was in sales/marketing, it was all about hitting your quota. If you were good, your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month. It gave the higher performers the leeway to work when they wanted to, and also give an incentive to the average sales people to up their game to be able to do the same.
As a developer, a majority of the companies I worked at there was no incentive to go above and beyond, even at the end of the year in terms of bonuses. Sure, the guy that was burning himself out for that extra 1% yearly raise usually got it, but it never made any sense to me to work that hard for a few more pennies over the year.
Now in my 30's, my attitude is to get my stuff done and stay off my managers radar. My sanity and work/life balance is too important at this point in my life.
your boss didn't care what you were doing as long as you hit your quota every month
Where I work (software/hardware for research) the basic principle is actually not different: boss doesn't really care what I'm doing as long as I'm not unhappy and the stuff which needs to get done gets done in time. Sure there are no fixed periodic deadlines or money-based quota, but the same principle nonetheless. I wouldn't want to work in another way because of all the freedom it gives you. I do see the same 'drawback' regarding carreer opportunities etc but the older I get the less I care. I earn enough money to sustain my lifestyle so yeah I'm definitely not going to work my ass off just to earn a bit more or get a better position, as I know that won't make me any happier anyway.
At least part of most people's job is being available, however. If you work on a team or are even nominally in a support role, you've got to be available for questions, meetings, collaboration, and so on. Very few people at places I've worked in the past have a job that can be easily defined by "I cranked this many widgets, now I can go."
Additionally, the 40 hour week protects people who got a difficult task from being held over. I realize there are stories of working 80 hours a week, but in my experience most people leave at 40 hours, which forces managers and sales people to set realistic delivery dates based on those hours.
I understand the concept of being "available" because my employer has a rule of core hours that one can be expected to be available for questions/meetings/whatever.
At the same time though, sometimes you can learn a lot by not being available. There's documentation that can be written, and sometimes users need to actually read the manual instead of interrupting you to answer a question you've already answered to them three times before.
Sigh. That last one is the worst. Especially if you've written documentation, pointed it out to them before, and been told "I don't have time to read that".
Funny to see this now. I left Amazon about 3 years ago, because there was no career path advancement for fewer hours.
I would've stayed at Amazon longer if at the end of the year instead of paying me more money they would've been willing to just make me work fewer hours.
That's interesting. 8 solid hours of coding leaves me wanting to go for a run or go out singing with my friends.
OTH, back when I was paining houses and hauling ladders around all day, I felt like sitting down in front of a computer for the rest of the evening after finally getting home.
Me too; not that I often code 8 solid hours (I take out time to walk in the mountains and cook for instance) but when I anything more than 4 hours solid I have tons of energy. After 3 hours of meetings however, not so much.
It also mentioned patient care was improved, which is important because it establishes that the gains went beyond the employees who got two extra hours of free time. That could establish the groundwork for some similar studies in different disciplines where perhaps the costs don't increase in the same ways.
I believe Amazons program was something like come to work from 10:00 to 14:00 Mon-Fri. The problem with this is that I think it's a lot easier to be pressured to stay longer over the course of a week than if you only worked 3 days a week.
This is why I like Google's version, where you can work on personal projects. You are still around if people need you, but you can work on other things as well rather than burning out trying to work on one thing for 40+ hours a week.
I heard once anecdotally that google side projects are sometimes "supposed to be work related" so not quite as free as you'd imagine, FWIW...or perhaps they're not dunno never worked there.
I think they are supposed to be work related, but that's still a change of pace. There are things I want to fix at my job that will never be fixed because it isn't anybody's job, and nobody would let you mess around with it because it would be circumventing the normal decision making process. It would be really nice to just say "I'm just trying something out," without needing to schedule an hour-long meeting with 8 people to create a roadmap.
Ouch. I feel lucky to have enough autonomy I can blow a few hours out of a week "just trying something out" without being grilled why I wasted a few hours over it.
It doesn't seem like the best type of business to experiment on. It would make more sense in a business where hours worked more obviously is not the same as productivity.
When I read about this in The Guardian way back when, they mentioned three other cases:
Brath
For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.
The company, which has 22 staff in offices in Stockholm and Örnsköldsvik, produces as much, if not more, than its competitors do in eight-hour days, she says. “It has a lot to do with the fact that we are very creative – we couldn’t keep it up for eight hours.”
Toyota
At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a 7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme.
“Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.” Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.
Filimundus
Linus Feldt, boss of Stockholm app developer Filimundus, says the six-hour working day his business began a year ago is about motivation and focus, rather than staff simply cramming in the same amount of work they used to do in eight hours.
“Today I believe that time is more valuable than money,” Feldt says. “And it is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you focus more and are more efficient.”
In the Bloomberg story, but not in the Independent story:
"Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the interim report."
Something in those numbers doesn't add up. I gather they maintained the salaries. Good. They had to hire more people, at a cost of 12 million kronor. This mechanically reduced unemployment, and saved the state 4.7 million kronor. Shall I deduce the unemployed people were paid 40% less than the salary they got? Something is wrong there: in France, unemployment insurance maintains 75% of the base salary. Saving only 40% looks quite low.
I need a more detailed analysis. If generalised, this would significantly reduce unemployment. We could thus lower the unemployment insurance rates. I've seen predictions this basically balances out: we can sustain the current effective salaries at no cost.
The way this is presented here, this theory appears to be false. Does it? I'm sure we can draw a more definite answer, but this article is not enough.
It could be their first job, they could have been long-term unemployed (you don't get aids forever) or they could have had jobs with lower salaries before.
Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess.
Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts.
The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc.
Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...
As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a bit longer of a day.
I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of benefits from 3 day weekends.
The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age, employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams about costs.
Agree. Six hours a day seems foolish. All that time getting ready for work, commuting, etc only to spend six hours at work. I'm a much bigger believer in just being closed on Fridays if possible
Somewhat on topic: I work 4-days/10-hours: 2 morning hours from home, commute to the office clears my head, 8 hours in the office, and Friday is free.
Pros:
- three-day weekends all year long
- 20% less commute time
- magically enforces the "Read-only Friday" rule
- if I have to handle an emergency on Friday, it means overtime pay
- Friday is good for running errands
Cons:
- clients/coworkers still work on Fridays, so I can't ignore my email entirely
- occasional meetings happen on Friday
This is probably not a good schedule for everyone, but I have been working it for 2 years now and I like it a lot. Although none of my coworkers are following this example...
Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it.
These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school education. 97% who works with it are women.
What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours, instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme.
Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up for work in the public sector.
Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better pay.
This was a bad industry in which to pilot this. There are obviously hard time requirements in terms of when such a facility has to be staffed. Obviously, cutting everone's hours means that other people will have to be hired to pick up the slack. It's hard to believe that no one saw this coming. I'd be more interested in seeing the impact of a 6-hour working day on a business that doesn't function in this way.
So, 1.5 million US dollars over two years (less, if you account for the saved unemployment costs. ref. trynewideas comment), for happier employees and better care. I personally have a hard time seeing this as any form of indication that it's "spiraling out of control".
I agree with other commenters, this smells of politics more than economics.
I work in a healthcare system with 120,000 employees. Let's say we reduced hours to 6. Using the Swedish numbers, that would cost our organization $2.6 billion dollars, or roughly 10% of annual budget.
Unfortunately, at least in the US, going down to 6 hours a day makes you a part time employee, at which point you lose a lot more than even 25% of your pay. Frequently benefits are pared down to the point of extinction, including health, vacation and holidays.
Unfortunately it may not work due to the politics, but it's one of those things where govrrnment-subsidized research will help businesses down the line. The cost on paper versus real cost is not immediately obvious.
This was in a nursing home, so depending on the level of care, there might only be 1 nurse on staff overnight. They could still be doing 8 hour shifts.
UBI can't be cost-effective as a living wage. Living wage UBI would cost more than the entire current US government budget.
Some UBI proposals aim to replace all of the current welfare systems with one UBI system that costs the same. (That wouldn't be what happens, but let's consider it for the sake of argument.) Those proposals have to limit UBI benefits to an amount that is below a living wage in order to stay within the budget of the current welfare system, assuming everyone receives the same amount of money (that's the definition of UBI, and any system that gives different amounts to different people is not universal or basic.)
Plus, the government's budget would have to shrink if tax receipts drop, which they would clearly do if lots of people chose to live off UBI instead of working. So even the non-living-wage UBI proposals are probably unrealistic.
UBI seems like a good idea at first, but it seems less attractive the more you look at it.
My own really short story, I (sysadmin/ops/programmer) currently work remotely about 4 hours per day, and I'm way more productive than when I worked 8.
- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none, or just a couple of hours.
- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable.
- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better.
- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments".
6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was in 8 at my old job. I feel productive.
This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time.
I agree, working 4 hours a day will feel more effective than the last 4 hours of an 8 hour day, but the question is whether it's actually twice as effective. And perhaps it's so for very high level tasks, but I'm pretty sure for some things you just need to clock in the hours, like closing 100 tiny bugs because you're launching in a few days.
I agree, though a lot of the time what I need to do requires just thinking about stuff, sometimes I need to plough on and just do stuff. 6 hours of coding something, writing, whatever. When that happens I just do the work.
I'm lucky in that I can work the hours I need to work. Last week I did days that lasted 4, 6, 1.25, 1.75 and 4 hours (the 1.x days I had other stuff on).
To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis.
To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved the cost of the extra cost.
But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy.
The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been taken into account?
Submitters: please don't submit an article that's clearly lifted from another publicly available source. Submit the latter instead. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
What a waste of a study. If they the end result is that they didn't realize the cost up front. I think this is just a poorly written click bait title.
100% they knew the cost. The outcome was :
>The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving.
While we are headed to super automation and the reduction of workforce (And a stagnant or growing GDP) it is either free money for the non-workers or reduced work hours. It's Jetson's again.
If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with [4,6,8] working hours?
In general it's difficult to measure the productivity of developers, since the a single commit can mean years of maintenance.
Measuring the code quality is equally hard: linting and code conventions will only get you so far, designs need to be reviewed by humans.
I would think you have to extend that to number of hours worked prior and rest intervals. I am quite sure that a number of developers can put out good code is a short crunch that has long days, it is sustained output that I would like to see.
Maybe instead of automation taking away jobs, people will end up working less hours. This was a reduction of hours without automation, so 17 nurses had to be hired
This felt like click bait, it's about a Swedish nursing home - I was assuming this was related to office / tech work as it was high up on HN. It does sound ridiculous that reducing hours mean hiring 17 other staff - I've heard of tech companies being able to handle a few less hours per working week and benefiting from it.
Everyone in the job market needs be on such a roster or it won't work, thus it is not a failure in itself.
If every business was required by law to have a tea lady (or man) per every 50 employees it would not make any business uncompetitive, and would be sustainable, and it would reduce unemployment, and I'd get a cuppa.
Would you take it if the 10 hour day was 8am-7pm with an unpaid hour for lunch, and the 6 hour day was 9am-4pm (with something approaching a 25% pay reduction.)
We do 9-5 or 8-4 and everyone "kind of" take lunch during those 8 hours and managers don't throw a fit about it. Unlike my last employer, where managers were sticklers about covering lunch hour or favored eat your lunch at desk kinda deal. I would be totally fine with a 8am-7pm -- disciplined 10 hours day. I don't have a family, but i can see people appreciating and spending a three day weekend with their kids. Also for young people, this can take the concept of "seekender" to more literal levels.
Here on HN I always read people saying that you are more productive working 5 to 6 hours a day instead of 8. According to the people claiming that, the people who got a 25% cut in working hours should have performed better thus accomplishing the same amount of work. That obviously did not happen.
I think it's different with physically intensive jobs, such as nurses in the trial, and mentally intensive jobs, such as programming etc. The latter may very well end up being equally or more productive, while physically intensive jobs probably would end up with reduced productivity.
Well as another commenter pointed out, they had to hire fewer people than a naive man hours calculation would suggest, so their productivity did increase.
It's essentially a myth [0]. According to the latest stats from the European Commission [1] the French work 40.4 hours/week on average (including paid/unpaid extra hours; excluding meal breaks and travel time), which is close to the EU average of 41.4 hours.
This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication.
I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.
This is not my experience. I work for a French multinational games company and I'm situated in Sweden.
It's astonishingly common for my French counterparts to "arrive" at there computer at 10:30 each day and head out the door shortly before 17:00. Not to mention the 1.5hour or so lunch they tend to take.
This is a sample of maybe 20 people, and maybe it's a culture of the company more than the country, but I've noticed they like to shake hands with everybody on the floor before starting their day, and they also like to take a coffee first and have a chat. For me though, I operate "remote" and when they are not available on Lync/Skype then they may as well be not working because they're.. not.. working.
it is a stark contrast to my team who are jacked in before 9, and save for a few hourly strolls to the canteen and lunchtime do not leave until 18:00. (unless something breaks then we stay, which is common in crunch times.)
Interesting. I worked for a multinational, we had a (brilliant) German intern who worked in our FR headquarters, very long hours. Then she moved back to Germany in a local division, where she was always the last one closing the lights, by a long shot. It might be the effect of headquarter vs local company, perhaps, but 5pm is what I saw in most plants in Germany.
Nobody works 6 hours/day. Most contracts will be 35h (7 hours/day) to 39h per week.
In engineering/programming/etc. you either have such a contract or often unlimited hours contract (so the only limit by law is something like 72h/week, IIRC), and, in practice, you generally do about 45 hours/week. It doesn't matter if you have an unlimited hours contract or a nice strict 35h contracts: you'll work 45 hours anyway and your 10 extra hours per week will not be paid. And when I say they are not paid, I don't mean they are just not paid more than the regular ones, I mean they are not paid at all.
Only in large traditional companies, the extra hours are counted and either paid or exchanged for extra vacation. But large companies have now outsourced most of the work to subcontractors, which use unlimited contracts or simply do not give a fuck about respecting the laws and are small enough so that there is no union. And anyway, go and try to unionise engineers/computer scientists...
In theory, it is 7 hours a day (for 35 hours a week contracts).
In reality, most office workers are pulling unpaid extra hours.
It's also possible to get 38.5 or 40 hours contracts, where you would get extra holidays to compensate (over a year).
I've worked as a programmer in France, Canada and England. In my experience France and England are pretty much the same in terms of work-time (8 hours/day, 5 week holiday), Canada is behind by lack of holiday (8 hours/day, generally 3 weeks holiday)
Edit: bare in mind this is based on my experience and will presumably be very different depending on the employer.
I'm wondering why they didn't begin with 7 hours, if it should have been expected that more money would have been spent. I feel the world is so wrapped in money that we are stuck choosing money over wellbeing...
Probably so the shifts could be organized better. If the nursing home runs 24 hours, it's easier to move from 8 hour shifts to 6 than to find a way for some people to be on 7 hour shifts.
They needed to employ 17 extra people on top of the 68 employees taking part in the pilot, in order to guarantee the level of service. Which to me is a win (17 people got a job) but it is clearly a cost increase that the employer was not ready to accept.
I think it's not a good business example to test cutting hours. Taking care of somebody 6 hours instead of 8 leaves a 2 hours shortage, which therefore must be covered.
I still miss the days when I was working in a power plant and worked a 40-hour week, over four days. Especially since the schedule was arranged so that the off-days were staggered to produce a four-day weekend every other week.
The only downside was, ironically, on holiday weeks, because the holiday pay was only 8 hours, which resulted in still having to work four shorter days, and often screwing up a long-weekend cycle.
Please don't start or feed any more flamewars on Hacker News. This subthread is the kind we hope to avoid, and your role has been trolling even though I'm sure you didn't mean it that way.
You have a history of breaking HN's civility rule. We've cut you a lot of slack for a long time because some of your other comments are good and interesting. But eventually we have to ban accounts that behave this way, so we'd appreciate it if you would please fix this.
I don't know ANYONE who would be happier if they got a 25% pay cut except for, maybe, single hippies who want to smoke dope all day and have no responsibilities. The average person, on the other hand, and particularly those with kids, would be devastated by a 25% cut in pay.
While a 25% pay cut sounds extreme, my wife took a 20% pay cut to work a 4 day week and she's never been happier. She has more time to do the things she wants to do.
Since I spend so much time working after hours, I'm not sure it would be such a good deal for me -- I'd still tend to work even on my "day off". Good thing I enjoy my job.
Which I think leads us to a reasonable question, perhaps appropriate for a phase 2 implementation -- did anyone ASK the nurses if they would take a 25% pay cut?
Not wanting to play Masters Of The Universe with Swedish nurses or anything, but wouldn't it be possible for Gothenburg to have two nursing homes, one with 6-hour shifts and the other with 8? Set pay on an hourly scale. Then see who goes where.
But getting to the 25% pay cut point, we should at least acknowledge that tinkering with work weeks will have repercussions, some predictable (e.g. will teachers benefit?) and some not.
I'm being at-home-dad one day a week, so I have also reduced my working hours with 20%.
In Sweden, salary over a certain amount is taxed with somewhere around 60% (not the full salary, only the part over a certain threshold). I haven't bothered looking up the exact figures but a reduction of working hours with 20% had led to an actual salary decrease around 10% due to these taxing rules.
In my view this is a damn good deal. I get a full day of and only pay 10% of my salary for it.
(I too enjoy my job a lot and work after hours but the extra day of still means I get much more relaxing weekends).
There's definitely a difference in the pay packets between skilled workers and minimum wagers. Folks on a decent salary can definitely afford to trade some money for time.
The flip side of the coin is that the better-paying jobs tend to also be more enjoyable than the scrub jobs. I love my current job as a sysadmin, and am happy to work a full week, but back when I was on phone support, I would have loved to have carved a day off if I could have lived on the remainder...
I'd happily take this trade-off: work less (in a professional, salaried position) and get paid proportionally less. I'd love to work a 24 or 32 hour work week at 20-40% less salary. I value my time more than I value money.
You said "I don't know ANYONE...", and I gave a counter example of how SOMEONE might choose to take a pay cut in return for fewer hours. While our household income didn't go down by 20%, her own disposable income did go down by 20% (actually more than that since she kept her 401k contribution the same, she pays a fixed amount for health care so that ended up being a higher percentage of her income, and her transit pass was not any cheaper even though she only needed it 4 days a week instead of 5).
Our needs are pretty modest compared to our income, we try to live below our means... if a law were passed that no one could work more than 6 hours/day, we'd get along just fine.
I took a 15% pay cut just to move to a job closer to home - I gave up a 60 - 90 minute commute in exchange for a 10 minute bike commute.
While this comment has some decent points, it's really only looking at the problem from a surface level and from a very narrow view of the proposition. For starters, I'm sure you do know someone that would be happier if they got a pay cut as long as that cut came with reduced hours. I, for one, would happily take a pay cut proportional to hours worked if I knew I got an extra day off every week because the money I lost would be gained right back from the childcare and other expenses that I pay just so that I can work that additional day. It also takes the costs away from other things that are normally associated with working. If you hadn't gone 0 to 60 with the hostility, you could probably have a conversation about this. Unfortunately, I think your oversimplification combined with your attitude killed it.
I'd advise caution. Last time I did the same I lost the ability to vouch.
Responding to the comment itself: the idea behind reduced workweeks is that some jobs become more productive with fewer hours worked. But those are probably all white collar jobs.
I'd say there's something deeply, fundamentally broken in a society if the very thought of people being able to live while working less seems so anathema.
> Last time I did the same I lost the ability to vouch.
Shoot an email to the mods, I'm sure they'll restore it.
Looking at rebootthesystem's previous comments, a couple are a bit heated but in general it's decent quality. I've made worse comments than that one without getting flagged myself; assuming good faith goes a long way.
Assuming you're referring to the discussion that followed your vouch, I know people who talk like that comment in person, and their tone of voice and body language makes it clear that they're reasonable and genuine people just with a different vocabulary. But it's impossible to tell online, with only text.
Indeed. I find I take extra care to review what I've written with an eye towards how it could be interpreted uncharitably. I'd rather not waste time and good will working through any misunderstandings.
I'm just a little sad some people don't understand the difference between "being offended" and simply not wanting a default-hostile tone on a discussion forum.
People ought to be able to work no more than six hours a day.
Really?
Why does anyone work eight? Or ten? Or twelve?
Did this 8 to 10 hour per day thing get sprung on people and forced upon them from nowhere?
No. Of course not. It's something that achieved a "natural" balance over decades (centuries?). And the balance has hundreds of variables driving it. From personal happiness to international competitiveness and productivity with even more variables across varied industries and cultures.
Nonsense is picking a number out of thin air, be it six or four hours and proclaiming that, not only will this work but it will result in happiness and a real improvement in employment figures.
It's like going into an ecosystem with some balance and killing off all the rats. There will be consequences. And they will likely not be positive.
You can't force a nation into a six hour work day without leaving behind measurable destruction. And this destruction would range from the personal (individual, family, kids, social groups) to corporate and national. You just can't do that and expect positive results.
This isn't about not liking the idea of working less and devoting more time to "living life". No, this has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the reality that these decisions exist in the reality of a very complex local, regional, national and international competitive marketplace.
A change of the sort being discussed would forcefully move away from a balanced position that allows everyone to earn a reasonable living, companies to remain viable while facing a myriad of competitors operating under different rules and society to function.
And so, proposing that people would be happy while facing a massive change in their standard of living, their ability to save for their future, feed their kids, take trips, have free time (because they will need two jobs), etc. simply isn't in alignment with reality.
To further propose that this would also improve employment is equally misplaced because this metric --the number of people being employed-- isn't a measure of anything other than a head count. A more useful measurement would combine head count with standard of living, savings rate, leisure time, quality of child care, etc.
These conclusions are faulty to such an extent that suggesting this approach would work could only be done from a less than lucid frame of mind.
In other words, it's nonsense and you'd have to be on dope to believe it would actually make society better.
Could we make such a thing work?
Yes, we could.
How?
Through massive global changes that are likely to require centuries to achieve. In other words, Star Trek territory. Not impossible, but, today, highly improbable because it would require dozens of nations to agree on terms and coordinate such changes over extended periods of time while making significant concessions.
> Why does anyone work eight? Or ten? Or twelve? Did this 8 to 10 hour per day thing get sprung on people and forced upon them from nowhere? No. Of course not. It's something that achieved a "natural" balance over decades (centuries?). And the balance has hundreds of variables driving it. From personal happiness to international competitiveness and productivity with even more variables across varied industries and cultures.
People work 8 hour days because left wing labour movements, unions, and politicians argued for it. Much like some people in Sweden are doing now. Some companies / countries tried it and found it to be good, so it spread. Prior to that working days would be between 10 and 16 hours, six days a week. I'm sure many people argued as you are now, 'only the lazy want to work less than 16 hours a day', 'it won't work logically', 'it will be impossible to implement'.
Turns out they were wrong and you probably are too.
Did this 8 to 10 hour per day thing get sprung on people
and forced upon them from nowhere?
No. Of course not. It's something that achieved a
"natural" balance over decades (centuries?).
Nonsense.
In the United States, the eight-hour day for everyone came from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937. Australia got it state by state starting in 1916 (Victoria 8 Hours Act) and nationally in 1948. The Mexican constitution of 1917 also prescribed an 8 hour day. None of these are "centuries" old.
Obviously, individuals and unions demanded shorter working hours before these acts were passed. However, if you look at the spread of these demands, it all happened pretty fast--and at a time when communication and coordination were significantly more difficult than at present.
Right, but the reason it was set to 8 and not 4, 7 or 6 or 10 is that this is a "natural" (using the word in quotes because it isn't quite so) balancing point that came to be understood over centuries, way before these laws were passed. The numbers were not pulled out of thin air.
I don't know the answer to this. It'd be interesting to understand how long the work day was in ancient times. Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc.
Even with slavery, there had to be a forced optimization of labor hours simply due to the fact that people would get sick or even die if subjected to unreasonable schedules.
The world somehow seems to have achieved labor balance at eight hours per day. It's interesting that this seems to be the case in most nations and cultures on the planet. That's what I mean by it being the "natural" work day.
To force something different at a national level (less or more hours) would put that particular nation at odds with other nations. It would also have detrimental effects at all levels, from the individual to the nation itself.
I insist these changes are possible but not through forced legislative approaches. This is where I think, in the long term, robotics and AI will have a positive effect on society. If less people can produce more in less time and we can figure out how to cope with the societal changes this will spur, we could be on a path where people will be able to exist with much less (in financial terms) yet have good lives and achieve balance.
I can almost see an evolutionary path towards what today looks like utopia. I just don't know how to get there. Being in robotics myself I always worry about what it means to make machines that can displace humans. Not sure where the answers on that might lie.
I find it odd you use your grandparents (horrible) experience (I'm assuming in WWII?) to bolster your argument. Not sure what that has to do with being needlessly antagonistic.
And using terms like "bullshit" and "hippie logic" and calling that "being honest" does not serve the discussion, rather whatever need your ego has to invalidate the expressions of others.
You aren't a martyr for free speech or the free exchange of ideas. You're just rude. You could have easily made the same arguments in a constructive way rather than leading with insults.
Despite what your grandparents have been through, I bet they'd slap you if you spoke to them as rudely as the way you've addressed everyone here.
"Offending people" isn't "being honest" or vice versa. If they seem to go hand in hand, that's failure on the part of the communicator almost 100% of the time. There are tons of people who are totally honest all the time, who somehow manage to not offend random people when interacting with them. It can be done, it's not magic.
Being offended is one of those really weird states of mind.
It is purely one that is created by the person who becomes offended.
For example, in some cultures crossing your arms while someone is talking to you can be deemed offensive. In other cultures burping is perfectly fine while in others it is not acceptable.
Leaving cultures behind, people, individuals, become offended for a huge variety of things and it varies from person to person.
The difference here (and other fora) is that those who choose to be offended pile on and engage in down-vote wars that are utterly meaningless. Being offended serves exactly zero purpose and does nothing whatsoever to the facts.
The facts in this case are that a national reduction of hours work --for everyone, not just someone's wife-- is a nonsensical and destructive an idea as can be. You can't force something like that without severe consequences.
The "hippie on dope" comment was merely a colorful way to describe the state of mine someone would have to be in to think that this is a good idea at a national level.
It's not about "getting offended". I told you to tone it down because your comment is unnecessarily hostile. If you, as you say, didn't intend it to be hostile you should take my comment even more seriously: You're coming across as increasingly hostile and rude in each new post you wrote.
Calling somebody a hippie with hippie logic just because you disagree with it? That's not a reasonable thing to do. It's not something I, or I'm sure even the person you were talking to, got offended about - it's just unnecessary and veers the discussion from "friendly chat" to "argument where everyone has their guards up".
That's not ok, nobody wants HN to be that.
If you think this isn't a reasonable think to ask, then what are you doing here?
Please stop. You are reading what you want to read and not what was written.
Where did I call someone a hippie?
I called it "hippie logic". This is what I said:
> What kind of hippie logic is this?
I did not call a person a hippie.
And, besides, since when is hippie a pejorative anyway?
It's like saying "drunken logic". You are not calling someone a drunk.
Geez.
Nah, people are just choosing to be offended because that's a thing today and piling-on with a holier-than-thou attitude is easier and if feels good.
Funny thing about choosing to be offended --and it is a choice: Nothing happens. Your head does not explode. You can still walk and chew gum at the same time. It's one of those empty things people seem to love doing these days. They also believe they have an inherent right to never be offended by anything. Pretty funny considering the times we live in.
It's OK. I get it. Still doesn't change the truth of the argument one bit. It is a great way to not have to argue facts though. Get a dozen people to be offended and very soon we are talking about that and nothing more.
Do you know what would have been a far better response? To completely ignore the utterly insignificant "hippie logic" part and actually go after my argument.
Don't know what vouching is. It sounds like I should thank you for it. Thanks.
Reflecting upon these various exchanges I had a feeling that there's something odd at play. You see, people such as yourself have consistently misconstrued or misunderstood what I've been saying, both in tone and content. Your last comment is no different. At first I thought it was just people choosing to be offended for a truly silly comment intended more as a joke than anything else. A friendly jab, if you will.
Yet, I did not say or mean what you say I said or meant. Not once. And so I wonder if there's a language barrier of some sort at play here. Either that or a simple case of text-based communications being imperfect enough at times that it can lead to people reading something very different from what the author meant to say.
I have a feeling it's a bit like this scene, where two people almost come to blows due to a misunderstanding in language and intent:
Your comment was flagged by users due to the reasons I mentioned. Vouching makes it visible again.
I'm fairly certain there is some form of language barrier at play here which is why myself and many others have been trying to engage with you rather than dismissing your messages.
You have a lot of people reacting negatively to the tone and language you used in your post; insisting on phrasing such as "hippie logic" and just generally taking a negative stance in the replies.
I want to highlight this: nobody here is getting offended at your posts. Likewise, nobody talking to you about tone is calling out the meat of your argument.
You replied to a post further down saying "The validity of an argument is absolutely independent of the messenger". Yet, that post did not question the validity of your argument. It questioned the language you used, which is entirely dependent on the messenger.
MaulingMonkey already tried explaining this to you: this is a super ineffective debate technique. You're getting people to flag your post instead of getting them to read it. HN is not a community that rewards "who speaks the loudest".
I also understand you may genuinely think it's "hippie logic" and in your view, you're just "telling it like it is" by calling it so. Let me put it this way: In my view, believing in an all-knowing all-loving deity is crock. But if I'm engaging a theist especially if I'm going to debate with them, I'm going to respect them and their viewpoint even if I don't believe or disagree with it. And here, you may well be engaging with people who believe in that hippie logic; if you want to convince them otherwise, not using that language will go a long way to get your point across.
You can email me (it's on my profile) if you want to discuss this more in private.
I think the difference here is that my "hippie logic" term was taken completely out of context and translated into a negative tone. And, yes, I got defensive because that's not how I meant it at all and nobody seemed to want to discuss the real points being made at all. So it quickly got completely twisted into a version of that scene in the video I linked.
If we were talking face to face and I said "man, that's just a silly argument" or "you must be drunk to think that way" you'd know it was offered in a friendly tone not in a negative aggressive one.
My mistake: I should have added a happy face.
Thanks for your patience. Be well.
PS. I've pretty much given up debating theists. Not enough hours in a day (there's a pun there somewhere).
It doesn't matter. None of it matters, even if this is all correct. Which it isn't, obviously. But it wouldn't matter even if it was.
If you can't communicate your ideas to people without muddying the waters with random stuff that distracts from whatever you are trying to communicate, you have failed. And if you don't care whether or not anyone understands you, then there's no point in even attempting to communicate with other people.
It doesn't matter if everyone else on the planet is brainwashed, or if you aren't as wise or articulate as you think you are (only one of those explanations are true, we can let Occam's Razor decide). It doesn't matter. It's your responsibility to read the room and communicate in a way that conveys whatever your meaning is without distracting from it. This applies just as much to Real Life as it does to Internet forums. This is never going to stop being a socially and professionally stunting problem for you; the rest of the world is not going to wake up one day and suddenly find you charming and insightful.
Everything you're saying could be 100% true, but you'd still be the person screwing up whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
Calling bullshit might not the best approach if you want to convince others to see things the same way though. Could you lead with your reasoning, rather than by outright dismissing the original argument? (Especially using a term like 'bullshit', or even 'hippie logic' that's likely to shut people down from considering your points, whether that makes them delicate or not.) Just putting myself in the parent commenter's shoes, if I expressed my thoughts regarding the study, and read the response that my position was hippie talk without merit, my natural reaction wouldn't be to reconsider my position.
There is nothing whatsoever wrong with labeling nonsense as such. If it is nonsense it is nonsense. We can devote five paragraphs to describing it in a number of styles of prose and it would still be nonsense.
Sometimes I want to call nonsense nonsense and bullshit bullshit. I have those days. We all do. Today was one of them.
I am not going to apologize for something adults ought to be perfectly capable of dealing with. So much time wasted focusing on the style of the message rather than the argument itself. That's a choice made by the reader. Just like someone listening to rap music can choose to conclude it is foul crap and ignore the underlying messages, which may or may not be valid. The reader (or listener) makes the choice.
I have yet to see a solid argument showing that the statement I responded to was nothing more than nonsense. I repeat it here for convenience:
> Then again, the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them. In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees.
Slicing it up and paraphrasing:
"they would have received a 25% cut in pay"
"they would have to hire more people to make up for the deficit in man-hours"
"people would be happier"
"employment would increase"
So:
We pass a law that says "people can only work six hours".
Everyone loses 25% of their pay. Whole households.
Companies still need to make widgets so they run more shifts and hire more people.
Yet now entire households have a severe income deficit.
People are forced to make ends meet and either work double shifts or look for a second job.
This does not lead to happier employees, happy families, good family life, well-cared-for kids, etc.
And so, the statement is nonsense. People get paid less, work more and are miserable. They are not going to be happy and the higher employment numbers are fake and useless. This is as close to nonsense as one can get and yes, it'd take a very unique state of mind to think this a sensible idea.
I think it was the "hippie" epithet that upset people (using the name of a group of people as an insult, on top of the original insult, is not likely to go well here). People who advocate for shorter work weeks are genuinely concerned about the big picture, long-term effects of overwork. You might get more traction if you recognize that and explain that maybe they're missing some essential little picture, short-term details, rather than dismissing and insulting their views.
> When something is nonsense it isn't hostile to call it nonsense. Why waste paragraphs?
Correct, that part's fine.
The part that comes off as hostile is equating everyone who would be fine with a 25% paycut to being a "single hippie who wants to smoke dope all day and have no responsibilities" - certain implications of lawlessness ("dope" being illegal in various parts of the world, and frowned upon by many) and sloth (a vice or sin in various religions.)
Perhaps that wasn't your intent, but that's how you're coming across to me - and perhaps others. And as it doesn't actually help your argument in any way, I must ask you the same: Why waste paragraphs?
> That's part of the problem these days. You can't call bullshit bullshit because people get offended.
The validity of an argument is absolutely independent of the messenger.
People tend to forget this one as well. Some of the most foul rap music out there is authored and sung by people who have been in prison and have a hard time putting two coherent sentences together. Yet, in some cases, the arguments they put forth are perfectly valid.
People flag because they are offended. I find that interesting. I have never down-voted anyone for tone. I don't get offended (it's kind of a pointless state of mind). My approach is to either up-vote or do nothing. In other words, I am perfectly content with the idea that everyone needs to have the ability to say their piece without being stepped on, whether I like the tone or not.
The other interesting thing is people also fail to read and comprehend before posting a comment. Case in point, your comment:
> The part that comes off as hostile is equating everyone who would be fine with a 25% paycut to being a "single hippie who wants to smoke dope all day and have no responsibilities"
If you read my post this is not what I said. I did not equate "everyone" to this caricature purely intended to drive a point rather than be factually accurate.
In the context of a discussion where the proposal is to limit all workers to six hours a day it is far more likely true that people would be unhappy due to the massive hit in income. You can hate the messenger but the message holds.
> The validity of an argument is absolutely independent of the messenger.
But one's interest in attempting to engage the messenger in debate, or otherwise give them one's time, attention, and audience is not.
> The other interesting thing is people also fail to read and comprehend before posting a comment. Case in point,
I read it fully a couple times. Comprehend? I admitted as much: "Perhaps that wasn't your intent, [...]". Glad you find it interesting...?
My goal here in replying is pointing out what part of your post I thought it likely people were actually objecting to - misinterpretation or not - as I thought you were missing the mark.
> I did not equate "everyone" to this caricature purely intended to drive a point rather than be factually accurate.
And the point I'm trying to drive home here is that this use of caricatures and hyperbole is, perhaps, easier to misinterpret over the internet than you realize - and an ineffective debate technique. And polarizing. And what's getting you flagged - not the underlying message.
Communication is a two way street - part of the onus for communicating clearly does fall on you.
> In the context of a discussion where the proposal is to limit all workers to six hours a day it is far more likely true that people would be unhappy due to the massive hit in income.
Some people will be unhappy. Some people will be happy. There might be an interesting discussion as to what that breakdown looks like, both in percentages and in professions. I think we may disagree on where the lines are - to what degree it may or may not be nonsense - but it seems rather pointless to debate without at least trying to be accurate about it, yeah?
> I don't know ANYONE who would be happier if they got a 25% pay cut
First of all, relax. Second: Pay was not cut. This was an experiment with a 30h work week with 100% pay. Unions would never agree to anyones pay being cut.
The benefits they were looking for in this case would not be higher employment. The main benefit would be reduced people on sick leaves because of work related illness (stress, depression, overwork infections) as well ass less staff turnover, possibly more efficient work and so on.
There were times after the '08 recession where factories (e.g. Volvo) cut work hours due to reduced production, and in agreement with the Union (to avoid layoffs) they agreed to 90% pay for 80% work.
I'd take 90% pay for 80% work any day. 10% pay cut, sure, but higher hourly pay, and I would live well off 90% of my salary.
Second of all, please read my comment and the comment I was responding to. It says:
>> the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them.
and then the conclusion is:
>> In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees.
Which, again, is hippie logic. I don't know anyone who would be happy with a 25% cut in pay.
I was not responding to the article. I was responding to a comment with faulty logic.
Regarding your 2008 example. This is irrelevant. Of course people would take a cut in pay under such circumstances. Yet, again, this is irrelevant given the conversation. The proposal here is that utopia exists somewhere around working six hours. Then someone realized you can't do that and still produce the same number of widgets. Then someone said you don't need to pay people 8 hours if they work 6, yet, they should be happy. And, BTW, we can employ more people, because, well, you need 8 hours to do 8 hours of work.
The whole thing reeks of a government program designed to burn cash for who knows what reason. Spend millions researching something that can be demonstrated to be utter nonsense in 15 minutes in front of a white board.
Historically it was the experience of people who wanted the output of cottage workers, that the cottage workers would only work up to the point where they had earned their desired income level, rather than up to what the customer wished they would do. Gathering the cottage workers into factories enabled the boss/customer to insist on more hours of work (compensated at piece rate originally). People have shown themselves to be satisfied with doing less work for less money, even in the presence of demand that they could choose to earn more by meeting. This is perhaps a "cut in pay" from a total pay point of view. In terms of earned pay it is the same pay rate. During the Swedish demo it sounds like they were studying the effect of the reduced hours in isolation from the effect of a hypothetical pay cut. Clearly some workers ARE hippies and would be happy to work less than some of us do for less pay, a legitimate trade that autonomous, free individuals could agree to.
That's not my interpretation of the message you responded to. It too points out that the article mentions no pay cut and that a different source confirms there was no pay cut.
I think it's important to know that this experiment was done to quantify the positive benefits such as reduced number of sick days. In a country where sick days are paid by a public insurance, that's no small factor in this (a public employer that is).
Basically: if our government both provides for those who are employed but sick (often overworked) and for those who are unemployed, then perhaps more people should share public jobs?
The drawbacks and costs (how many you need to hire and what that would cost) was known.
In a full scale implementation of this, I doubt the deal would be 100% pay for 30h weeks, either it would be like in the Volvo scenario with e.g 90% pay 80% work, or a deal could include freezing wages for N years in exchange for slowly lowered hours over the same period.
Interesting, in Germany the people in the metal industry only work 35 hours a week, just 5 hours more, and they are one of the best payed groups. I guess it depends on how we can automate and how much we value this or that kind of work.
Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours.
I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this fact. You have to read the report to get that.
Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day.
report after 18 months 2016-10-11
https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/75...